VANCOUVER — More than 15 years after being shot and left to die in India, Brinder Rai still wakes up many days haunted by the experience.

The Calgary man, 37, has filed a lawsuit in B.C. Supreme Court accusing some of his relatives of what he calls an attempted honour killing. A notice of claim contains allegations that have not been proven in court.

The businessman and father of two young children, who was born in British Columbia, says he was abandoned by his father at a young age.

His great-grandfather deeded to him some ancestral land from his estranged father’s village in the Punjab, a move he says infuriated his father, grandfather and uncle, who felt their honour was damaged.

“Basically they tried to kill me and take my honour from me,” he said in an interview. “Even though I always had my honour, they felt I should not have any ancestral land as we had been abandoned in the East Indian community so we had zero right to anything on our father’s side.”

On a trip to India in June 1996, on a road that crossed through his property, the Jeep in which he was driving was stopped at a roadblock.

When he stepped out of the vehicle, his grandfather, Zora Singh Rai, shot him, he says in the lawsuit.

The bullet pierced his right lung and diaphragm, perforating his stomach, spleen, gallbladder, liver and some of his intestines.

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“I died a million times. From when I got shot to the time I went into the OR, it seemed like a million years. I had to watch every drop of my blood being spilled.”

Rai says he was unable to get back into the Jeep but had a grasp on the door handle, but lost his grip and fell. He ran into a nearby rice field and hid there as his assailants searched for him in the dark.

“I heard these guys walking within metres of me and they missed me. My whole bowels were protruding from my rib cage. If there is any horror that human beings can witness, I lived the horror that night.”

Other shots rang out in the night. Harbhajan Singh, one of several men who accompanied Rai in the Jeep, was killed.

In the aftermath of the shooting, Rai says he was transferred from hospital to jail with open wounds and his Canadian passport confiscated.

He was accused in Singh’s murder along with others but was released on bail, staying in India for more than three years to exonerate himself and his co-accused.

Since the shooting, he says he has received death threats to keep him silent about what happened, most recently a threat delivered in December.

In the lawsuit he claims that at various stages of his ordeal he has been the target of corruption and bribery in India, including the bribery of a judge.

In the wake of his near-death experience, he continues to re-live the horror.

“I’m almost 40 years old and I wake up in my blood so many days out of every year since I was 20 years old, I’ll wake up and be … wet with sweat and thinking I just died. Then I still have to go to work the same day and still be normal around my kids.”

Because of the effect of his injuries, he says he doesn’t know how long he will live and didn’t want to die “leaving something unexplained for my small children.”

His lawyer, Gary Botting, says the death threats remain under investigation by police.

The lawsuit alleges Rai was deliberately and maliciously assaulted and battered. It names Zora Singh Rai, a resident of Richmond, B.C., and five other relatives as defendants.

Brinder Rai is seeking general, special and punitive damages.

Zora Singh Rai could not be reached.

Brinder Rai’s father, Gurlal Singh Rai, a resident of Langley, B.C., and one of the defendants, said he hadn’t yet been served with the lawsuit but denied the honour killing allegations.

“He got shot by somebody else,” he said of Rai. “It was not my father. He was too old.”

Gurlal Singh Rai, the son of Zora Singh Rai, said that his father is now in his 90s and would have been too old to have been involved at the time.

He said Brinder Rai wasn’t telling the truth and that his family received a death threat 10 days ago, a threat that he says was reported to police.

“He’s trying to get some money,” he said of his son. “But it’s not an honour killing.”

The dad said he expects he will be filing his own counter-lawsuit against his son.